7. Pleasure and Pain – The Divinyls 1985

 

Break my body, with the back of your hand
Doesn't make sense from where I stand
Baby, baby why you want to mess it up
Sooner or later I'll find my place
Find my body better fix my face

 

 

I’m a bit of an introvert. I’m a mad-keen horse rider. I’m also lucky enough to live in a rural residential area, which means I have both space around me and an endless list of jobs that need doing around the property. However, the prolonged COVID-19 pandemic that Australia, and the rest of the world, is still navigating makes me appreciate my situation so, so much.

            About three months into Australia’s COVID induced lockdown I had a former workmate get in touch. This, predictably, resulted in me suggesting that we catch up over lunch. After many attempts to arrange a time and place for us to have said catch up, my friend let on that she was too scared to go out in public in case her husband saw her.

Yes, you read correctly. She was scared of running into her husband (refer to my problems with the word husbandry in Post 6)!

            An offer for my gorgeous, qualified chef, partner to cook a lazy Sunday lunch at our place was made and accepted.

            Now, before this weekend, early during Australia’s lockdown, I’d had conversations with colleagues about the implications for vulnerable women and children of being locked down with their abusers. At this time my attitude had been along the lines of:

 

‘Don’t get yourself caught in a situation in which you have to lockdown with an abusive arse-wipe.’

 

Blunt and insensitive, I know, but despite Australia having a disgustingly high occurrence of women dying as a result of domestic violence, I didn’t understand how women let themselves get caught in situations where they had to stay with their abusers.

In my friend’s situation I really genuinely felt for her. She had followed her “husband” to Australia from China with their young daughter. A few attempts at domestic violence later, he decided to return to China, leaving my friend and their daughter alone in a foreign country. He then returned to Australia just long enough to impregnate her.

Last I heard she was getting by raising two kids by herself in an unfamiliar land.

Hubby was apparently getting annoyed at paying a mortgage on a house he wasn’t living in and paying for children he had nothing to do with. So he invited himself not just back to Australia, but back into the family home.

By this stage he had to work from home due to COVID and his frustrations were manifesting in a physically and mentally abusive manner that resulted in my poor friend grabbing the kids and heading for the police station at some dark (literally and figuratively) hour.

I can only imagine the strength it would have taken for her to do this, given the cultural cringe of women leaving their husbands in China, and her limited understanding of the English language and cultural norms in Australia.

While I’m very grateful that she extracted herself and the kids from this situation, I just wish she had of  come to me earlier so I could have tried to help her out.

Just two months after finding out about my former workmate’s situation I caught up with a friend I’d had since primary school. This catch up reminded me of a drunken conversation we’d had a few years earlier in which she asked:

 

‘Is it rape if you’re in a relationship with the guy?’

 

I wanted to cry as we drove across our hometown and she said she was still scared she’d run into her old boyfriend – more than twenty-five years after she’d escaped him.

My near and dear friend had gone through this abuse while we were living in the same town and still in occasional contact, but I didn’t know her boyfriend was abusive until many years later, well after she’d fled town to get away from him.

During the drive across our hometown, just a few weeks back, she told me that she put up with her partner’s abuse for over a year while she tried to figure out how to get away from him. Even after she fled town, he spent the next year calling her up, swinging from trying to sweet talk her back to town, to threatening her – because how dare ‘Oh my God! A woman!’ dump him!

With at least one woman a WEEK dying at the hands of her partner in this country pre-COVID I think it’s time for men to quit thinking of women as their possessions that can be treated like crap if they choose.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rH8hcfhG1Jo